Business Development - Professional Services

Business development is a key priority for any organisation but the professional services sector has particular considerations and challenges.

Partners and fee earners are drawn to a focus on billable hours and their experience is often in imparting expert professional advice to their clients. But what is the long-term impact of a focus purely on billable hours? What happens if there is no focus on developing new opportunities? This can give rise to a 'feast or famine' situation where a firm can be very busy one month and searching for business the next. In addition, there is a need to grow the business through identifying new opportunities in an increasingly competitive market.

Fee earners and Partners are often not aware of how close their existing skills are to those required for effective business development. We often find that Partners can have beliefs and assumptions about business development that have a significant impact on their motivation to engage in it. Tools and techniques for effective business development will not be applied unless the individuals see the value and believe they have the abilities and skills.

RTP focuses on programmes that address these important issues of beliefs, assumptions and motivations. This enables us to then provide some simple but powerful tools that your fee earners and Partners can see immediate benefit from using. We often combine this development work with different techniques that embed the new skills in order to see long-term behaviour change.

We have found that personal credibility of the facilitators is particularly important when working with fee earners and Partners and so our facilitators have a background in consultative, high-value business development.